Philip Rivers doesn’t show up every weekend to throw spirals to kids at the local park. Chase Headley doesn’t regularly hit fly balls to Little Leaguers on their own tiny diamond.

Tony Hawk — the most famous skateboarder in the world — however, has ripped around the Magdalena Ecke Family YMCA in Encinitas for a couple of decades, dodging the neighborhood groms (translation: kids).

So, too, has the next-most recognized guy on two trucks, Shaun White, along with virtually every other famous vertical skater of this and previous eras, including Danny Way, Bucky Lasek, Pierre-Luc Gagnon, Jake Brown, Bob Burnquist, Andy Macdonald and Mike McGill.

A skateboarder rides out of a bowl at the Magdalena Ecke Family YMCA skatepark in Encinitas. Many top professional skateboarders have rolled through the park over the years.
— K.C. Alfred / UT San Diego

They’ve all been drawn to what could be called the Ramp of Dreams. That would be the enormous wooden halfpipe at which skaters teeter on the back of their boards, push down like they’re stepping on a gas pedal and hurl themselves headlong down a 13½-foot wall that leads to an upward face of the same daunting height.

It’s a rollercoaster with no tracks.

“I was 8 when I first dropped into the ramp,” White once recalled. “I had dreams that I was going to drop and keep falling.”

The thrill and danger and athleticism is what Hawk and others brought back to skateboarding after it all but died in the 1980s and early ’90s. At ground zero of that evolution was the Encinitas “Y,” the longest-standing skate park in San Diego County.

“When skating was at its deadest point, they were the one to actually test having a skate park,” Hawk, 45, said. “No one else was doing it because skating wasn’t popular enough or there was too much insurance drama.

“This was the only place to skate ramps, and it became the epicenter of skate parks. From the mid-’90s to 2000, all of the vert action was happening here.”

San Diego always was on the cutting edge of skating and skate parks. The Del Mar Skate Ranch, where Hawk learned tricks from some of the early skate pioneers, was the most well known among a handful of parks in the county in the 1970s, but by the mid-’80s all of them were gone.

In 1986, McGill moved to North County and later opened up his own skate shop. He built his own skate park in the hills in east Carlsbad, but implored the City of Encinitas to fund a skate park. He proved skating could make money by holding his own contests, and the city finally obliged, opening the first version of the YMCA park in 1990.

Like surfers attracted to a gnarly shore break, skaters came from around the world to skate the Encinitas halfpipe, which the park received as a donation from the X Games. In 2004, that ramp was replaced by a similar structure from the ninth X Games.

Skaters in San Diego have two large halfpipe options — the other being at the popular Mission Valley YMCA Skate Park in Clairemont.

“It was one of the first parks with a vert ramp, and what put us on the map was how many pros were skating it,” said YMCA co-manager Mike Wilson, 32, who has worked at the park since 2002. “We got put in magazines so much. You’d see us 15 times an issue. That made us iconic.”